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By Chris Lovejoy
If your social initiatives are left to one or two individuals in your team, you are missing out on the far-reaching benefits of an integrated, company-wide social media program. Want to get a little more love from your social efforts in 2022? We’ve got some simple tips to help you grow your followers through engaging a larger team that will help ensure you are top of mind with your customers and prospects.
Ask for the follow! Add your social links to your digital newsletters or other communications. Occasionally carve out a prominent section or module in your digital communication to invite them to follow along on social. If you send once a month, shoot for the enhanced social module once a quarter. If you can dynamically populate, make sure your new customers get that module in their first communication, and don’t forget to point out why they should follow. If you provide downloads, whitepapers, or other information to customers or prospects, make sure you are adding hyperlinks to social channels in those digital documents too.
Whatever you do, don’t hide your social links on your website. It’s fine if they live in the website footer navigation but make them quick and easy to identify and click—oh, and make sure they actually work. Also, ensure they are on all your web pages so that if someone is two or three pages into your site, they can still readily connect and follow. Don’t forget social links on forms and confirmation pages. TIP: have those links open in a new tab. Remember, you’ve got a captive audience when they’re providing you information; ask them to follow you on social media.
It's probably time for some spring cleaning on your employees' professional social profiles. Make sure titles are correct and that you've shared branded creative assets they can use for background images. It's also best to have a nice profile image or headshot that's business-like but casual, and preferably no cartoon personal profile pics on LinkedIn. Of course, personal profile pages should be unique to the individual, but there are many advantages to having a nice, branded, and uniform look for the social channels of your top executives and management team.
On LinkedIn, make sure employees share your articles, posts, media, or links in the Featured Section of their pages. This is especially important for leadership and sales. If a potential customer is looking at your product or service, they will also dig a little deeper via social and look at the broader team. Additionally, with more posts and visibility to individual pages, it always pays to have other marketing and company information easily accessible for those poking around your profile.
Regularly share new or updated marketing materials with your team for distribution on social channels, and be sure to provide your team with brand-friendly posts that can be easily copied and pasted for sharing.
Using Teams, Slack, or one of the many other group chat tools out there? Create a specific social channel on your internal communications platform to help promote your news and happenings on social media. Share specific links that you want your team to help amplify. This is also an excellent way for employees to quickly share other news or relevant content with the larger group, and specifically, this creates a direct line with your marketing team so they can share on corporate social sites.
Do you know the hot hashtags for your industry and those that your competitors are regularly using? Is your hashtag bank up-to-date? Those relevant and popular #words can be a big help in getting your posts viewed and help grow your followers. Include hashtags as needed, preferably within your social message and not at the end of your post.
Start following everyone important to your business! Make sure you follow your customers, including the company and your individual clients, especially LinkedIn. Keep a shared list of business and customer names that your team can easily follow on social. Set up your own process to follow customers and clients (new and existing) from your business social channels. Monitor customer posts and like/love, and share when appropriate, and make sure you share with the broader organization so your team can help amplify those customer posts as well.
Follow industry leaders, SMEs, tastemakers, and influencers. There’s always news you should know—keep tabs on your competition, monitor industry news that you can share to your social channels. You can quietly keep an eye on talent that you might want to recruit as well.
Don't underestimate the power of company-wide social sharing! If your organization has 50 employees and each employee has 500 connections/followers, that's a possible 25K impression carrying your news and info, not accounting for shared contacts, of course. Creating a simple, company-wide social sharing infrastructure is easily the biggest "bang for your buck" initiatives you can do.
Looking to find some love for your social initiatives in 2022? Contact Waters Agency to learn more about how we can help with your social roadmap and specifically integrate with your marketing and PR efforts.
And don't forget to follow us on all of our social channels.
